Learning Tokens

Owned by Alfonso Govela
Last updated: Mar 09, 2022
6 min read

A proposal for Hyperledger Mentorship Program 2022 and NEFERTI


Summary

Communities benefit from collaboration. Learning through interactions with others capitalizes on everybody’s resources and skills. Beyond independent work, individuals achieve higher levels of learning when knowledge grows collectively. Engagement and coordination become essential, and rewards can provide the incentives to motivate behavior.

We propose a Learning Token as a positive reinforcer that recognizes, registers, and rewards community engagement in collective learning, certifying the acquisition of skills and competencies.

It was a demand expressed when presenting our Mentorship Project, Global Scouting for DLT / Blockchain Educational Opportunities. It is a shared interest with the Global Blockchain Business Association, GBBA, an opportunity for collaboration that Karen Ottoni from Hyperledger Foundation kindly and generously opened for us.

Background

In 2021, we began our journey with Hyperledger Mentorship Program with Global Scouting for DLT / Blockchain Educational Opportunities. For three summer months, we built a preliminary Directory of Educational Opportunities, assembled a Taxonomy of Content and Places of Learning, and represented our Ontology in a Knowledge Graph to help navigate the universe of educational opportunities.

In that first phase, we missed reaching a large crowd of people, places, and resources, and we did not spark a community of learners. We learned our hard lessons. Goals take time to mature, well over one summer. It is better to extend the Mentorship period to six months of half-time engagement of Mentees. Direct questionnaires to our Hyperledger Community had little results. We need alliances with institutions with powerful follow-up traction.

Today, for our second phase, we have two tracks in mind.

  1. An agreement with GBBA to collaborate on their Global Standard Mapping Initiative, GSMI 3.0, at key area number four: university courses and degree programs mapping. Voluntary mentees from Universidad Tecnólogica Nacional, UTN, at Cordoba, Argentina shall populate our Knowledge Graph with programs listed in the GBBC-GSMI Map of 389 Universities and showcase its navigation potential.
  2. With your support, Hyperledger Mentorship Program 2022, we would like to engage a thriving community with our Learning Token, both as NFT and FT.

In the future, for Phase 3, Linux Foundation could lead a coalition of universities to lay the foundations for a peer-review system of accreditation to certify a top-quality DLT / Blockchain, like the service provided by the Global Business Education Network, AACSB.

Interwork Alliance Token Taxonomy Framework

We propose to use the composable Interwork Alliance Token Taxonomy Framework (IWA TTF) to produce aLearning Token that recognizes, registers, and rewards community engagement in teaching and learning experiences, certifying, at the same time, the acquisition of skills and competencies.

Communities that agree upon valuable behaviors can turn those behaviors into unique token representations of their value and set up clear rules for its creation and supply, able to resist modification or tampering, and, most important, capable of being transferred per-to-peer. Our Learning Token is proof of behaviors that benefit learning communities, individual members, and collectivity.

With IWA TTF, we shall define common token concepts with a clear understanding of our requirements. We shall specify properties for particular behaviors. We shall link their base Token Classification Hierarchy with our Taxonomy of DLT / Blockchain Educational Opportunities as initial meta-data for standard artifacts and control message descriptions.

There are robust foundations for this project. Hyperledger and Global Blockchain Business Association, GBBA, are Launch Associate Members of the Interwork Alliance, IWA. Digital currencies and NFT open-source repositories are available. We shall take advantage of eThaler, the ongoing work of NEFERTI, and the IWA Github repositories for artifacts.

Community Roles

The community stakeholders create the asset value of collective knowledge through four possible roles and sets of activities:

Learners

Study, consult, understand, absorb, ask questions, find their way, try new things, share knowledge, teach others, and learn about learning.

Educators

Create content to facilitate, teach, tutor, mentor, set objectives, give purpose, listen, reflect, and explore new tools for teaching.

Curators

Oversee the collection of learning resources, selecting themes, evaluating the content, finding, filtering, gathering, organizing, and mixing materials for teaching and learning.

Maintainers

Guarantee the means of operation, track ongoing work, inspect, preserve, repair, fix, keep up, follow through, document, and communicate.

Although all roles are equally relevant, there can be moments when specific strategies could prioritize different engagements to reach deliberate benefits. Equivalent to monetary policy, communities can change the value of concrete actions to promote particular behaviors.

Marketplace

Our marketplace shall be an infrastructure to match learners, educators, and curators. It shall build a repository of interactions for maintainers to facilitate, keep, evaluate, and support.

Community stakeholders create collective knowledge. Trusted educators certify learning skills and advanced competencies.

Learning Tokens integrate into personal profiles recognized engagement and certified achievements.

A wallet holds personal profiles as accounts of Learning Tokens plus a collection of verifiable credentials.

Such profiles are valuable for the community of issuers, holders, and potential verifiers such as employers, investors, or sponsors.

Initially, our Learning Token is the unit of account and the store of value for collective knowledge. As the community grows its services, it might become a medium of exchange to retribute rendered services.

Learning Tokens are fundamental KPIs for collective learning.

Token definition

We start this process with a proposed Hybrid Token tf(tN,tF), that is, fungible with a class of non-fungible and fungible tokens.

  • Token Variables according to the Token Taxonomy Initiative, TTI:
    • Token Type: Two types,
      • Fungible to reward engagement in the community.
      • Non-Fungible to certify accredited acquisition of skills.
    • Token Unit: Singleton, no subdivision.
    • Value Type: Intrinsic, the digital token itself is valuable.
    • Representation Type:
      • Common, for fungible engagement rewards, tokens are balances on a single DL, without individual identities.
      • Unique, for non-fungible certificates, NFTs with their own identities.
    • Template Type:
      • Single, without any child tokens, for engagement rewards
      • Hybrid, with a single parent and many possible child tokens, for certificates in paths of learning
    • Token Properties
      • Behavioral property, their value is determined through logic and calculation. Established and reviewed periodically by community consensus.
        • Transferable, for engagement rewards.
        • Non-transferable, for certificates of learning.
        • Indivisible/Whole, for rewards and certificates.
        • Mint-able, ability to issue new tokens for both types.
        • Role Support, ability to have roles defined to allow or prevent actions.
        • Burnable, ability to remove our Learning Tokens from the supply.
      • Property-Set artifact
        • To be defined at workshop.

This Token Formula shall advance to a consensus definition of our Learning Token.

Working process

We propose to work with Linux Foundation and GBBA GSMI Area 4. We already have our focal point with GSMI, but we still lack a focal point with Hyperledger and Linux Foundations. Suggestions are welcome.

We shall follow the quoted phases defined by IWA on their site:

  1. Business case and economic model for digitization.
  2. Business definition of the targeted tokens.
  3. Identify base token types, behaviors, and properties. (IWA Token Designer).
  4. Reuse existing artifacts (from the IWA GitHub repository) as appropriate; catalog new artifacts as required.
  5. Contribute new artifacts (to the IWA GitHub repository). If needed.
  6. Keep our Learning Token platform-agnostic and implementation neutral.
  7. Use IWA partners to certify our token definitions. GBBA GSMI Area 4, Hyperledger Foundation, and Linux Foundation.
  8. Identify certification bodies to foster a trusted, interoperable ecosystem.

2022 Calendar and deliverables

June

- Week 1. 6/1to 6/11.

   - Coordination with Mentee. Review and approval of working plan.

    - Identification of Focal Points at Hyperledger and Linux Foundations.

- Week 2. 6/12 to 6/18.

    - Planning of Workshop for Business Case and Economic Model for digitization.

- Week 3. 6/19 to 6/25.

    - Workshop for Business Case and Economic Model.

        - Two Virtual Meetups to engage communities.

        - One Virtual Workshop for interested parties.

- Week 4 6/26 to 7/2.

    - Report of Business Case and Economic Model.

July

- Weeks 5 and 6. 7/3 to 7/16.

    - Initial business definition of the targeted tokens.

- Week 7. 7/17 to 7/23.

    - Review with Focal Points initial business definition of the targeted tokens.

- Week 8. 7/24 to 7/30.

    - Report of Final Business Definition of the Targeted Tokens.

August

- Weeks 9 and 10. 7/31 to 8/13.

    - Formal description of base token types, behaviors, and properties. (IWA Token Designer).

- Weeks 11 and 12. 8/14 to 8/27.

    - Reuse existing artifacts (from eThaler, NEFERTI, and the IWA GitHub repository) as appropriate; catalog new artifacts as required. (First part)

September

- Weeks 13 and 14. 8/28 to 9/10.

    - Reuse existing artifacts (from eThaler, NEFERTI, and the IWA GitHub repository as appropriate; catalog new artifacts as required. (Second part)

- Weeks 15 and 16. 9/11 to 9/24.

    - Contribute new artifacts (to eThaler, NEFERTI, and the IWA GitHub repository) as needed. (First part)

October

- Weeks 17 and 18. 9/25 to 10/8.

    - Contribute new artifacts (to eThaler, NEFERTI, and the IWA GitHub repository) as needed. (Second part)

- Weeks 19 and 20. 10/9 to 10/22.

    - Use IWA partners to comment upon our token definitions. GBBA GSMI Area 4, Hyperledger Foundation, and Linux Foundation.

    - Create a wallet for personal profiles (First part).

November

- Weeks 21 and 22. 10/23 to 11/5.

    - Create wallet for personal profiles (Second part)

- Week 23. 11/6 to 11/12.

    - Incorporate comments from our IWA partners into our token definitions.

    - Identify certification bodies to foster a trusted, interoperable ecosystem.

- Weeks 24 and 25. 11/13 to 11/30.

    - Final Report, written and Meetup Presentation

Conclusions

A Learning Token empowers communities for collective learning. Our original project, Global Scouting for DLT / Blockchain Educational Opportunities, begun at Learning Materials and Development Working Group, expands to our Hyperledger Latinoamerica Regional Chapter, and allies with Global Business Blockchain Council and their Global Standards Mapping Initiative.

Learning Tokens as KPIs for collective learning can benefit us all. Enriching personal profiles of engagement, skills, and competencies. Empowering learners, educators, curators, and maintainers of DLT / Blockchain Educational Opportunities.

Alfonso Govela

March 9, 2022